Spot Light on North Korea, Part
One: Film and Propaganda in North Korea
Since the death of Kim Jong-il in
2011, North Korean cinema has received a surge of interest. The facts and
fictions surrounding the North Korean cultural propaganda industries are as
dark as they are bizarre. This three part article interrogates the construction
and the function of North Korea’s global image by
examining the film produced there.
Prisoners of Film
In
1978 Kim Jong-il orchestrated the unusual and high profile kidnapping of two
South Koreans who he brought to his personal
compound in North Korea. A North Korean kidnapping alone is sadly unremarkable.
Political kidnappings are an expected, if undesirable aspect of many coercive
regimes. What is unusual, however, is that these particular South Koreans, Choi Eun-hee
and her ex-husband Shin Sang-ok, were not threatening political figures, but
film makers. They were taken by Kim Jong-il not, as might be expected, because
their films challenged the North Korean regime from across the border and he
wanted them silenced, but rather because Kim had admired their film making so
much that he was determined to have them make films for him. Kidnapping the
pair was just the most efficient way to go about this.
Choi,
a much respected South Korean actress, disappeared whilst away in Hong Kong and
when her ex-husband, the director Shin, went looking for her he too was
abducted by North Korean secret agents. Choi was taken directly to North Korea whilst
Shin reported spending five long years in prison, fed mainly on grass, before
finally being delivered to Kim Jong-il. Kim apologised for the
‘misunderstanding’ and welcomed him into North Korean high society. As Shin
soon discovered, Choi was also living amongst the North Korean elite: half
captive and half esteemed guest. At a dinner party held by Kim, Shin and Choi
were reunited and under the auspices of the Great Leader they were hastily
remarried. The reunited couple were to begin making more films together
immediately. This time it would be in keeping with the propagandist objectives
of the North Korean cultural industries. Kim would be at the helm as executive
producer, naturally.
In
what seems an act of cartoonish dictatorship, Kim forcibly took Choi
and Shin and detained them to manifest his cinematic fantasies. It is no secret
that cinema can be a highly influential tool in persuading the masses of one’s
particular political bent, but Kim took this to another level.
The Kim Jong-il Show
In the
present day the North Korean nuclear program, political tensions with South
Korea and America and a rare change in leadership have put the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea in the spotlight again. Alongside this, the cultural
propaganda produced in North Korea is also gaining attention; spectacles such
as Arirang Festival, a mass games featuring thousands of synchronised gymnasts
and school children, are relatively famous in the outside world. Badly photoshopped images released by the North Korean
government exaggerating military might have also made the rounds. It’s clear
from the stories and images that do reach the West that spectacle and display
play a key part in maintaining the self-purported image of the DPRK.
North
Korea is as dark as it appears inexplicably weird; essentially a dictatorship
with its roots in Stalinist ideology, as Amnesty International’s screening of Yodok
Stories
recently highlighted, it comes complete with labour camps, rural starvation and
zero-tolerance on regime criticism. Coupled with this are stories of Kim
Jong-il the late ‘Great Leader’s’ flamboyant love of sushi and Jean-Claude Van
Damme films amongst other frivolous pastimes. Such light hearted and strange
tales of excess against a back drop of human rights violations are all the more
sinister and disconcerting.
After
the ruling Kim dynasty changed hands when ‘Great Leader’ Kim Jong-il died at
the end of 2011 and passed the reigns to his son Kim Jong-un, news reports were
accompanied by the disarming spectacle of wailing masses of grieving North Koreans, apparently devastated at
the news of their dictator’s death. The Western media began to speculate;
did they wail out of fear or was it a form of brainwashed ‘love’ - a kind of
mass Stockholm syndrome?
Film and the Soviet Start
Kim
Young Soon, a defector and former detainee of one of the country’s most brutal
prison camps spoke recently at Amnesty International’s North Korea Freedom Week. She asserted that North
Korean’s were generally ‘totally brainwashed’ by lifelong exposure to
propaganda about the regime’s infallibility and many genuinely did believe Kim
Il-sung to be their saviour. A look at the government produced film of North
Korea and the themes it embodies goes some way to explaining why. When the
Soviet Union installed Kim Il-sung as the leader of the newly split DPRK in
1949, the country began producing films in earnest to prop up the story of Kim
as the great liberator of the North Korean people. My Home Village released the year of the separation tells the story
of a poor Korean man who is oppressed and exploited by a greedy feudal landlord
around the time of the Japanese occupation (1910 – 1945). After much struggling
the villager escapes enormous hardship only when Kim Il-sung’s Revolutionary
Army swoops in to save him from the Japanese forces. Thus starts the work on the creation of the
new North Korean society, headed by the Supreme Leader himself. And so it was.
This
creation myth of North Korea is echoed in much of the state media, always
omitting the defeat of Japan at the end of the 2nd World War by the
Americans and the fact that it was the Soviet Union that stormed on North Korea
after the Japanese left and installed Kim as the de facto head of state. Films
and other propaganda from this point onwards paint Korea as a country with a
rich 5,000 year history, much of it plagued by selfish and corrupt aristocrats,
landlords and feudal kings who kept the people poor and would do anything to
preserve their own privilege and lives of luxury. It took Kim Il-sung’s
socialist revolution to break this cycle and free the North Korean people,
guiding them towards collective happiness. The cult of personality around Kim
Il-sung in North Korea is enshrined in law and endures today (he was proclaimed
‘Eternal President’ after his death).
Pyongyang
clearly learned a few tricks from the USSR’s propaganda arm, reflected in unmistakeable echoes of socialist realism in the style and subject matter of North Korean
film. Lenin’s aphorism, “Cinema is the
most important of all arts”, was held in high esteem by the late Kim
Il-sung. The film making he oversaw consistently portrayed communist or
revolutionary themes. The Soviet Union reportedly even donated film making
equipment to the North Korean government to get things kick started. Cinema was
seen as an essential vehicle by both regimes for instilling government ideology
in the populace and in the case of the North Korean administration was, and
still is, a tool for bashing the earlier Japanese occupation or disseminating
anti-American and anti-capitalist sentiments. In 1966 Kim Il-Sung made a call for juche art. Juche is a
specifically North Korean brand of self-sufficiency and resilience: "Our
art should develop in a revolutionary way, reflecting the Socialist content
with the national form" he announced. North Korean films of the
early 1970s such as The Rays of Juche
Spread All Over the World and The
People Sing of the Fatherly Leader envisage a socialist utopia and proclaim
the infallibility of Kim Il-sung’s leadership.
Kim Jong-il: Film
Fanatic
By the time despot-son Kim Jong-il took in over
the film industry from his father Kim Il-sung he had already been supervising
the North Korean film output for several years. Somewhat fanatical, it is
widely reported that he had amassed a DVD
collection of around 15,000 titles in a temperature controlled vault and was
particularly partial to Japanese and American films. He was delighted by
Elizabeth Taylor and the Japanese Godzilla franchise and sought to emulate the
powerful spectacle of some of the films from around the world that he had been
watching. Kim Jong-il became a master of the art
of propaganda and with his captive audience of 24 million he could use film to
manipulate an entire nation. In 1987 he even wrote a book, The Cinema and Directing, on how it’s done.
The
vast journalistic appeal of Kim Jong-il’s obsession with film is unsurprising.
There is something fascinating and absurd about the dictator’s film-fanaticism.
It is an absurdity created by the seeming incongruity of something so serious
(political totalitarianism) with something as frivolous as film (amusingly, one
of Kim’s favourites is said to be Bend It
Like Beckham!). However, Kim’s love
of film, far from highlighting the frivolity of the medium compared to
politics, actually illuminates the vast importance of film as a political
vehicle.
The
bizarre story of Shin and Choi’s kidnapping itself seems like a cinematic
fantasy; it’s difficult to believe that any world leader would spend time,
money and military resources on the kidnap and upkeep of film makers. The story
of Shin and Choi’s capture would perhaps be less surprisingly had the
kidnappings been related to espionage or national security, these being
explicitly political matters. But a cultural kidnapping seems ridiculous.
However, what Kim’s kidnapping of Shin and Choi demonstrates is the extent to
which cultural mediums are very much implicated
in the construction and dissemination of political ideology in North Korea.
Eventually
Shin and Choi managed to escape from Kim’s clutches. Having convinced the Great
Leader to let them travel to Vienna for a film festival they made a run for it
to the American Embassy where the pair were granted political asylum. They
lived and worked for some years in America, before eventually returning to
South Korea.
Far from
being just a means of entertainment for Kim film, along with grand spectacles
such as Arirang Festival, is a vehicle to educate and rally the population.
Behind the outlandish stories and wild claims, the human rights violations and
nuclear threats, North Korea is an apparently functioning society where
socialism has survived long after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin
Wall fell. Kim’s dedication to cinema is not just a funny hobby but, along with
his efforts in other means of cultural propaganda, helps to explain why North
Korea has managed to continue in such discord from the outside world for so
long.
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